Friday, February 16, 2018

Rumors of an important deal affecting the New York and Detroit American League clubs were current to-day following a lengthy conference between Miller Huggins, the new Yankee manager, and Frank Navin, president of the Detroit club. It was generally believed that the deal involved the transfer of “Ty” Cobb to the New York club. It is understood that President Ruppert, of the New York club, would be willing to pay a price never heretofore spent for a ball player to bring Cobb to New York.

Yeah, prime Ty Cobb wouldn’t have been cheap. In 1917, Cobb led the American League in hits, doubles, triples, stolen bases, batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, OPS+, and total bases. He had won 12 of the past 13 AL batting championships.

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I know very little about Japanese baseball, and I've never heard of Aramaki. His career does look very impressive at first glance - I'm reminded of shorter-career Deadball-era pitchers like Three Finger Brown or Chief Bender, thanks to his very low ERA, but I don't actually know how impressive that ERA is in context.

I know very little about Japanese baseball, and I've never heard of Aramaki. His career does look very impressive at first glance - I'm reminded of shorter-career Deadball-era pitchers like Three Finger Brown or Chief Bender, thanks to his very low ERA, but I don't actually know how impressive that ERA is in context.

He's eighth in career ERA among NPB pitchers. He was Rookie of the Year in 1950, and led the league in Wins and ERA, and was selected to the Best Nine. This was the only time he led in those categories or made the Best Nine, although he was selected to five All-Star teams. For the rest of his career he was consistently very good, usually placing in the league leaders in ERA, but never again having such a spectacular year as he did as a rookie.

A search for GS>=15 and GR>=15 turns up Guy Bush who did it 7 times between 1925 and 35 and Doc Avers who did it 6 times between 1914 and 1920. Danny Darwin (4) and Miguel Batista (3) are the most modern guys with a reasonable number of qualifying seasons but I suspect those are cases where they were in the rotation then out, not flipping back and forth. Still Batista is probably the closest we've seen in a long time -- from 2002-4 he was picking up 30 starts a year while still pitching 7 times in relief.

Val Picinich played 18 years without 100 games in any one season. He did play in more than 90 games three times and more than 80 three more. He was a backup catcher, as you'd expect. Tom Prince managed to play in 17 seasons without playing more than 66 games in any of them.

It does look like Crowley is the record holder among non-catchers and pitchers. Harry Spilman and Lou Klimchock are second with 12 seasons each.

It looks like for a decade Aramaki's typical season was about 20 starts and 25 relief appearances. Is/was that normal in Japan? I can't think of an MLB pitcher like that.

It was back then, yes, to the detriment of many pitcher's careers. The ultimate example is Hiroshi Gondo, who at age 22 and 23 in 1961/62, pitched 429 and 362 innings. He was never the same after those two seasons, and converted to an infielder in an attempt to save his career. His stats for those years are like something from a video game.